Forget Fairtrade - only free trade can help poor

As you glide along the supermarket aisle past the smartly packaged Fairtrade coffee and guiltily slip the cheaper arabica into your trolley instead, you may ask yourself how much good your overpriced purchase of the Fairtrade stuff would have done anyway.

Well, now you know. Today's report from the Adam Smith Institute will probably confirm your suspicion: Fairtrade labelling is largely a marketing ploy, which makes clever use of the almost infinite capacity for guilt harboured by the residents of wealthy countries over the condition of those in poorer ones, even though that condition is, in no rational sense, their fault.

But rational thinking does not come into this: you and your heaped shopping trolley represent wealth and security, which you have a vague but pretty firm notion that the people who harvest the coffee beans do not have. So maybe you are persuaded to make a gesture: a small strike against "exploitation" and global greed and (if you are old enough to remember this epithet) "corporate capitalism". And you feel better about yourself.

It transpires that a very small number of farmers are getting a subsidised fixed price for their produce under Fairtrade franchises and that this is at the expense of most other farmers in their regions, who are actually worse off as a result.

Related Articles

But even more serious, the Fairtrade operation helps to keep poor countries and undeveloped economies exactly that - poor and undeveloped.

By sustaining agricultural activity that would not otherwise be sustainable in the global marketplace, it keeps backward populations from developing other forms of modern economic activity that might help them climb out of their backwardness. In order to permit wealthy people to indulge in a bit of sentimental largesse, it effectively preserves an anachronism that locks some of the poorest people in the world in backwaters of primitive economic existence.

What developing countries need is to develop, not to have their present conditions of life and work preserved like a museum exhibit. And the greatest aid to real development - and the proven route out of mass poverty - is through free trade, not Fairtrade.

All of which should cause us to reflect on the various misuses of the word "fair", and its even more pernicious noun form "fairness", as it is bandied about in political discourse. As received opinion has it, "fair" means "equal" - in the strict literal sense of the word. Distribution of wealth in a society is "fair" if nobody has much more than anybody else - however much harder they may have worked, or however singular and disciplined their talents may be.

The corollary of this is that taxation helps to ensure "fairness" by seeing to it that those who earn more than others have more of their income confiscated. On this formulation, disparities of wealth are inherently wicked. This is a moral philosophy that you may or may not find attractive. But if you do, you will have to accept that it is fundamentally totalitarian. Disparities of wealth are a sign of a dynamic free-market economy in which some sectors are invariably expanding while others contract: at any given moment, some people's lot will be improving ahead of others'.

The more robust and dynamic the economy is, the more dramatic these spurts of certain sections of the economy will be. That is why disparities of wealth became more "unfair" during the Thatcher revolution in the 1980s - because the economy was waking up from its moribund state and leaping about all over the place.

The Left-liberal remedy for these disparities of wealth - enforced "fairness" by redistribution and heavy regulation of the economy - must penalise, or at least discourage, precisely those activities that are the most energetic, innovative and productive of wealth.

But the Fairtrade business should indicate that there is a quite different way of approaching this: instead of artificially subsidising poverty and lack of initiative by redistributing the wealth of the hard-working, a society could define "fairness" as creating more opportunity for self-determination in a vibrant free economy that encourages change, flexibility and personal development.

In other words, it could stop protecting people from any possible risk or consequence of failure and instead allow the economy to create as many new ventures and avenues as the market can bear, with all the myriad openings for idiosyncratic talents and temperaments that would create.

It is ironic that the very same people who are committed to the idea that "fair" must mean "the same" talk endlessly about "opportunity". Nothing is a greater killer of opportunities than uniformity.

Conversely, school selection is "unfair" if able children and conscientious parents are more likely to gain entry to "good" schools (which are only as good as they are because those children and their parents choose to go to them). So for educational opportunity to be fairly distributed, children must be allocated to schools by a blind lottery that takes no account of their abilities, their temperaments, their inclinations or their compatibility with the school's attitudes. This is a travesty of the notion of fairness, quite apart from a gross misunderstanding of what constitutes good schooling.

But even more dangerous is the peculiarly lethal principle of "fairness" that seems to prevail in the NHS (or at least at the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which determines what treatments the NHS may use): if everyone can't have it, no one should. On this basis, procedures and medications that could save or transform individual lives must be barred if they cannot be made available to every patient who might conceivably benefit from them.

Once again, "fair" must mean "the same": so the breast cancer patient who is a young mother may be denied the drug that could lengthen her life because it would not be feasible to provide it for all the breast cancer patients who are over 80, and if she offers to pay for the drug herself she may be barred from receiving any NHS treatment (because it is "unfair" for her to use her own money to buy what others cannot afford).

How have we come to accept such vindictive uses of the word "fair"?

Of course it was initially the fault of the Left and its special pleading lobbies, which - like some Fairtrade promoters - had a lot to gain. But the Right has been complicit: it has surrendered words like "fairness" and "opportunity" - and accepted caricatures of other words such as "selfish" and "greedy" - with scarcely a murmur of dissent.